Deborah Solomon: "In Philadelphia, Art Shows by Women Teem With Eros and Audacity"

Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn’t fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound.

By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg’s imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown’s world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited.

Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze.

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Cecily Brown’s Best Paintings Take Time to See

The subject of a handsome and high-spirited show at the Barnes Foundation, Cecily Brown is in no danger of being forgotten. Now 56, the British-born painter is one of the signal figures on the New York scene, having survived the contretemps of early fame and established herself as an artist of irrefutable seriousness.

In 2023, she was accorded an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Death and the Maid,” a thematically focused show of works lamenting the brevity of life; it was shoehorned into a too-small space. The Barnes retrospective, by contrast, which was organized with the Dallas Museum of Art, is not large — it comprises just 30 paintings and related drawings — but spans her career and feels expansive. It’s interesting to see her once-maligned early paintings, such as “Untitled” (1996), whose circle of humping rabbits, in hues of gold and blue, today could pass for a relatively wholesome campfire scene.

It makes sense that museums appreciate Brown, because she appreciates museums and centuries-old European masterpieces. She is hardly the only artist to raid art history as well as pop culture for inspiration — one of the defining activities of postmodernism — but she does so with an intelligence and ardor that are entirely her own. She isn’t interested in recycling the past to bemoan the exhausted present. Instead, she is a kind of artist-explorer, feeling her way, as if eyes could walk, into long-ago scenes by Degas or Goya, into Fragonard’s garden scenes or shipwrecks by Delacroix or robust hunting scenes by the lesser-known Flemish painter Frans Snyders.

In the process, she recycles figuration as abstraction, collapsing the timeline of art history into a one-of-a-kind expressionistic lexicon of whippy lines and whorls of curling brushstrokes. One of her gifts, as we see in works ranging from the riotous, red-smeared surface of her 25-foot-long hunting epic “The Splendid Table,” to a riveting, small-scale bedroom scene, titled “Body (After Sickert),” is the way Brown dramatizes the act of looking at art, the process by which we — the viewer, standing before an unfamiliar painting — take it apart with our eyes and then reassemble it.

Her best paintings and drawings take time to see, and the Barnes show would have benefited from benches. “Selfie” (2020), one of the standouts, deepens the longer you look. The painting takes us into a cluttered, high-ceilinged room where a nude figure rendered as a wave of pink flesh reclines on an iron bedstead. Or are there two nudes — a woman on her back and a bearded man face down beside her, lost in his own thoughts? Around them, paintings are hung salon style, covering every inch of wall space. The furniture, which includes a tall grandfather clock, suggests that the room is a 19th-century European studio, or a picture gallery that looks a little chaotic. The dozens of picture frames hanging on the wall form a jumble of rectangles that emit a quivering energy, as if shaken by an earthquake.